The book also comes titled "The Medium Is the Massage," a typesetter's error that amused McLuhan so much, he decided to keep it. I was just starting in the television business when I read this book and recognized immediately the nerve it struck. In those days, we were still filming in black and white. There were no satellite hook-ups. But it was already clear to me that people who knew how to use television had enormous power at their disposal. McLuhan proposed that the collective way we watch television has created a "global village," one that is more affected by the nature of the medium than by the content of the message. I'd only add this to the formula: Never underestimate the influence of dominant TV news personalities, like Walter Cronkite in his day and those who have followed.
Compared with the troubled New York Times of today, the newspaper Mr. Talese describes here--in his inside history of the Times from the postwar years through the 1960s--seems to exist in a golden age. Yes, we see the clash of giant egos and the infighting over everything from the coverage of the Kennedys to the appointment of a theater critic. But who, back then, could have imagined the Jayson Blair scandal or a deteriorating Times culture that allowed it to happen? When I was growing up, people thought: If it's in the Times, then it must be true. Who thinks that now? Reading Mr. Talese's hugely enjoyable, exquisitely detailed book in 2006 has to be a bittersweet experience.
This book stands out for how directly it addresses the arrogance and negativism of the press, which run counter to the way Americans feel about their country. Consider the media's current obsession with the wiretapping story. If an al Qaeda member is phoning somebody in the U.S., what are we supposed to believe--that he's looking for travel tips? Americans know better. On other matters, they can be more susceptible to media persuasion. Decrying the development of "attitude" journalism as a desperate attempt to hold onto audiences, Mr. Fallows says that leading journalists in the 1990s (the period under discussion) presented views of public life and public figures much bleaker than the ones they held themselves. The condition he describes so well has not changed.
Mr. Auletta's tremendous access to sources was the making of this entertaining book, subtitled "How the TV Networks Lost Their Way." Among other things, it shows how network people spend their lives sucking up, stabbing each other in the back and then going to corporate meetings promoting teamwork. I remember, from my own experience at NBC, the endless seminars on the subject of integrity. Chronicling the networks' struggles under new managers as audiences declined, Mr. Auletta draws on a vast reservoir of anecdotes. Some of them are familiar, like the one about Dan Rather's angrily marching off the "CBS Evening News" set, leaving the screen blank for six minutes. Most of the stories, though, come as insider intelligence of a high order.
This breakthrough book says: Let's stop pretending, let's finally acknowledge the elephant in the room--the fact that the media, composed largely of liberals, view the world through the prism of leftist politics and report the news accordingly. The subtitle of this best seller is "A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News," but Mr. Goldberg quickly became an outsider at the network after he first spoke out publicly on media bias. This treatment by CBS surprised the veteran newsman, because he had once been a liberal himself. But Mr. Goldberg also happened to believe in keeping an open mind. That's what made him unacceptable to his liberal colleagues.